About Me and This Site

• Running
• Lifting
• Hiking and Camping
• Cooking
• Computers, in as much as they enable other Interests
• Education

• Get down to 70KG
• 1234 on main lifts
• Complete an Ultramarathon
• Finish my Degree
• Unfuck My Brain Not Happening.

This site is running on a Debian 12 VPS, using Nginx for the website, with my email server on the same VPS not worth the hassle, dumped the email server and went with mailbox.org instead.

The contents are written using Hugo Static Site generator, with the source files being held locally.

Updating, archiving and optimising the site is handled with a bash script that creates a versioned copy of the Hugo folder, then minifies the public folder’s contents, then rsyncs them to the server. (The first and so far only bash script I’ve ever written…) Minification seems to break a few things like my favicon, so the script’s getting retired for now until I can solve that.

This site costs about 89 USD a year to run, a little pricey, but I pay as much for my email service as I do for my hosting.

Boring website fact: at present 28% of this site’s entire size is taken up by .xml files for tags

This site is my personal website, it isn’t your website, it isn’t some alphabet company’s website, it isn’t particularly nice to look at, I am not a professional, I don’t know anything about Webdev (as you can see) & that’s the entire point.

I made this website partly as a fun little challenge to myself and partly because I am frustrated with the state of the modern internet, especially the rapid centralisation of most services and forum spaces into a few obese super sites.

I wanted a space to talk about the things I wanted to talk about, in the way I want, without having to worry about arbitrary rules or community drama or corporate malfeasance.

There are probably not going to be content warnings or censorship of foul language or uncomfortable topics on this website, so you may wish to exercise caution when browsing if you are of a sensitive disposition. If in doubt, the title and subtitle of my content should give you a decent idea of the contents of any particular page.

(Addendum: 28/09/2024, my views towards content warnings are shifting, I will probably start using them and will nix this part of my about at some point)

I’m a weird guy, I like weird things, I’ll probably not directly embed anything that will get you fired but I may link to those things from time to time, so tread lightly and click responsibly!

When I was starting to write content for this website one of the things I struggled most with was trying to decide what tone I wanted to use and how I wanted to manage content, so I wrote a few rules for myself:

• I will write about things I want to write about, not things I have no interest in but think others will read
• I will not over produce anything I write, i.e. I won’t regularly agonise over word choice or endlessly redraft things that are more or less ready as they are~ This rule has been dropped, in practice it led to lazy, sloppy writing
• I will assume a few things of the reader:
  • They are somewhat technically competent, not being overly intimidated by computers etc.
  • They are an adult with a decent grasp of English
  • They are fairly emotionally robust and will not click off the moment they read or see something they disagree with, nor will they get upset easily
  • They are at least a little bit weird
• I will be honest, will make an effort to be upfront about my opinion, and will not self censor
• I will welcome feedback from others
• I will try to consistently improve my writing & presentation skills

As for how the website looks and feels:

• I will use a simple, legible colour palette that is more or less the same across most content
• I will avoid using any font, feature, image type etc. that is not widely compatible
• I will make sure the site is accessible and easy to navigate from a wide variety of devices
• I will avoid focusing heavily on aesthetics rather than content
• Conversely, I will avoid being lazy, the site should be presentable, nothing should be overtly ugly, nor should anything be hard to interact with
• I will rely mostly on my own content, images and resources, I will try not to embed other people’s stuff or externally link to images etc. where I don’t have to, unless it obviously doesn’t make sense to host something myself
• I will avoid introducing unnecessary technical complications

The Blog category gets much more leeway on the above points than other pages No, it doesn’t, there’s nothing here that wouldn’t apply to there.